How Will You Measure Your Life?

Christensen begins this chapter with an anecdote, telling the story of Honda’s entry into the US motorcycle market. At first, Honda set a strategy to tap into 10% of the motorcycle market. In the beginning, sales were poor. However, by chance, an employee began making trips with a smaller motorcycle called a Super Cub. Gradually, the market sought smaller bikes like this one, as Harley Davidson and Triumph cornered the market for larger bikes in the 1960s. Honda shifted its strategy, and its smaller bikes became a success. Christensen also discusses a similar shift in strategy made by Sam Walton, founder of Walmart. He uses the two stories to further examine the nature of deliberate and emergent strategy and argues that one should be both deliberate and open to new opportunities.

Christensen uses his own career path as evidence: He did not plan to become a professor. He initially wanted to be an editor for The Wall Street Journal, but after his business took a turn for the worse, he was offered an opportunity to join a PhD program at Harvard. This is how he entered academia, a career he has been in for more than 20 years. Christensen then discusses a strategy for determining which emergent strategies to pursue, an approach he refers to as “what has to prove true for this to work?” (53). He details Disney’s failure to operate an amusement park successfully in Paris, which he attributes to the company overlooking an obvious difference between this location and others in the US and Japan. Namely, the Paris location only had 15 rides, which meant customers would not spend more than a day there, while in the US, there are over 40 rides. Christensen maintains that any assumptions must be tested. He then discusses one of his students who took a job with a company that made many promises—yet, if this student had applied business strategies, she would have seen through the company’s exaggerations.

Christensen tells the story of a medical technology company, SonoSite, which was founded to develop and sell smaller, more portable ultrasound equipment. The company developed two pieces of equipment, one that involved the use of a laptop, named the Titan, and one that was smaller and handheld, called the iLook. When the CEO went into the field to observe a salesperson, he discovered that the salesperson was only trying to sell the laptop-run product, despite the handheld gadget being a better product. The company had mistakenly incentivized the selling of Titans over iLooks. Christensen refers to this as the “innovator’s dilemma” (64), a paradox in which a company effectively competes against itself. He uses this anecdote to build his discussion on resource allocation.

Christensen introduces an abbreviated history of Apple. When the company was founded, it had a clear vision, and Steve Jobs operated the company to fulfill the vision. When Jobs, the CEO, was forced out during the 1990s, Apple began to fade into irrelevancy, which Christensen claims was due to Apple losing sight of its vision. Engineers were given the space to work on their own ideas, which spread out resources. When Jobs reclaimed the helm of the company, he immediately changed course and refocused employees on a single mission—being one of the world’s best tech companies.

Christensen further explores resource allocation in his discussion of Unilever, a company that creates and sells household items like food and hygiene products. The company’s promotion structure conditions their employees to think in the short term rather than long term, which Christensen claims is an inefficient operating strategy. He equates this with the way Social Security and Medicare are mismanaged in the US. While political leaders seem to understand that these programs are doomed to fail, none of them want to do anything about it because action might jeopardize their chances of reelection. Their focus remains on the short term, reelection, rather than the long term, sustainability.

As he nears the end of the chapter, Christensen analogizes resource allocation to an individual’s life. He asserts that people have resources—such as time, energy, and money—and the way to achieve some measure of happiness is to ensure we spend our resources according to our values. For example, if a person thinks their family is what matters most, they must allocate the appropriate amount of resources to their family, more so than anything else. Christensen suggests that some of his old classmates strayed from happiness by allocating their resources ineffectively, prioritizing short-term gains—like financial success and professional accolades—over things like family and healthy marriages.